A New View of the Cosmos, and other stories
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from WIRED space writer Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Every day I mourn lost lives in Israel and in occupied Gaza, and I grieve for the many suffering families there. At the same time, we have to worry about the escalating war between Russia, Ukraine and NATO, and about risks of war between the US and China over Taiwan. And the Biden administration announced it’s investing in a new, totally unnecessary, nuclear gravity bomb, at a time when people are supposed be reducing their nuclear arsenals. It feels like the Doomsday Clock must be ticking closer to a catastrophic midnight, and it’s dangerously late in the day. But we must go on. It’s never too late to advocate for peace and justice.
Euclid’s New View of the Cosmos
Humanity now has a new view of the cosmos. I love these first images from the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope, especially this snapshot of a massive cluster of galaxies in the Perseus constellation, with tens of thousands of galaxies in the background. Every one of them hosts billions of stars and planets—a few of which are probably the home to aliens looking up to the skies, just like us.
How a Scientist and Cartoonist Envision Living on the Moon and Mars
People want to build settlements on the moon and Mars, and it’s going to be thrilling and much more grueling and dangerous than many imagine. I recommend the new book A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, and I think you'll like the illustrations in it, too. (Zach is the cartoonist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.)
NASA’s Psyche Mission Will Test Space Lasers (for Communications)
After a long delay, the Psyche spacecraft blasted off and now heads toward a metallic asteroid, which might be the remnant of a planetary core. Besides the scientific instruments, there’s something else interesting on board: a laser experiment. If it actually works, it could transform deep-space communications, such as for future astronauts on Mars who will need to send and receive lots of data.
How the Economics of Asteroid Mining Might Actually Work
Will asteroid mining become a thing? No one knows yet, but it could actually happen if deep-space spaceflight efforts ramp up within a couple decades and if demand rises for cobalt, nickel and other metals used in EV cars, clean energy tech, and electronics. People hyped space mining before (and I suppose I could be accused of that too), but it’s not too early to consider the ethical questions involved.
In other writing…
Have we learned nothing?
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Americans were gripped with fear, riven with grief, and the desire for justice that bordered on revenge. Two full-scale invasions and wars followed, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed. As David Klion writes here in n+1 magazine, the comparison to Israel following the Hamas attacks is apt.
I also recommend this piece in the same magazine and this open letter from Jewish writers. I could recommend many more, including this essay in The Baffler by Sarah Aziza, this NYT essay by Hala Alyan, and this piece in the London Review of Books by Adam Schatz.
Forbidden Fruit
Avocados seem ubiquitous in the US and Mexico, but it wasn’t always that way. Now demand for the stone fruit has quadrupled, and Mexican cartels have gotten heavily involved, people have torn down forest after forest to grow the water-hungry trees, and only a handful of communities in Michoacán have successfully resisted. Because of their environmental and social impacts, maybe avocados should be considered a treat, like red meat. A fascinating piece by Alexander Sammon in Harper’s.
I also liked this piece in the same magazine by Christopher Ketcham, about a modern-day “ecoterrorist.” And this new feature by Gaby Del Valle in The Drift magazine also explores ecoterrorism, but it’s broader in scope.
The creepy new digital afterlife industry
Could companies use your data to bring you back, in a sense, after you die? Who wants to become a ghost in the machine? I thought this was an interesting piece by Wendy H. Wong in IEEE Spectrum, an engineering and technology magazine.
The final ethical frontier
As space gets more commercial, how can it be governed ethically and fairly? I recommend this essay by Philip Ball in Aeon magazine (inspired by Erika Nesvold’s work, which I wrote about in WIRED earlier this year) as well as this NYT Magazine essay about space junk by Jaime Green.
In Harm’s Way
In the 1980s, California hastily built prisons in a dry lakebed in the Central Valley. Now some 8,000 incarcerated people bear the brunt of heat, drought and floods A well-researched and illustrated piece by Susie Cagle for Grist magazine and The Marshall Project.
What I’m reading: The Bloody Chamber, a book of short stories by Angela Carter.
Looking back: Four years ago, I interviewed Terry Tempest Williams for High Country News, and I reviewed a book by Sasha Sagan for Undark magazine. They wrote and spoke about finding hope during tough times and finding our place in the universe. I feel like we need that today, too.
More about me: I’m the space writer at WIRED magazine, and in 2022 I moved from San Diego to the Bay Area. I used to be a freelance journalist, and before that, an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter @raminskibba. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.